UPDATE: As you can see from the comment below, Adams has joined the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. He makes it sound like something that slipped between the cracks before.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg - who also happens to be No. 17 on Forbes' list of the richest people in the world - has knitted together 450 other mayors into a lobbying force on gun issues that is posing some real competition to the National Rifle Association.

The Washington Post details how how Bloomberg and several of his colleagues formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which last month played a major role in defeating an NRA-backed amendment that would have allowed holders of concealed handgun permits to to continue carrying their guns across most state lines.

To be sure, the mayors' victory wasn't overwhelming. The pro-gun forces actually mustered 58 votes, but given the way the Senate does math, anything less than a filibuster-breaking 60 votes counts as a loss.

At any rate, Bloomberg - who has ponied up $2.9 million of his own money to help fund the group - has gathered quite a long list of mayors, including Eugene's Kitty Pierce, Denny Doyle of Beaverton, Royce Pollard of Vancouver, Wash. and Greg Nickels of Seattle.

But one name is surprisingly absent: Portland Mayor Sam Adams. I have a call into his spokesman, Roy Kaufmann, but I haven't heard back yet.

Adams may simply have a different view on guns. Or one could speculate that Adams doesn't want to have the well-organized NRA jumping into the not-so-high-powered recall effort against him.